Personality and its psychological structure - Psychology

Personality and its psychological structure

Consciousness and psyche exist in a concrete person, individual, personality. Until now, we have used these words as synonyms, but in reality behind each of them there is a certain specific content. In their psychological interpretation there is no universally accepted opinion, therefore we will give a rather generalized position developed in domestic psychology.

The main problem is that in modern science there is no integral, sufficiently complete human science. The phenomenon of man is studied in various aspects (anthropological, historical, medical, social), but until now it seems to be disjointed, "not assembled" into a systemic and worthy whole.

This complexity extends to psychology, which, when studying and describing a person, is forced to operate with a bunch of terms, each of which is focused on a certain aspect of a single subject. And this selective orientation is rather conditional, often and inevitably intersecting with others.

The broadest concept is the "man". This is the accepted classical scientific abstraction, the generalized name of a special kind of living creature on Earth - Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens. In this concept everything is united: natural, social, energy, biochemical, medical, cosmic, etc.

Personality is a person who develops in society and interacts and communicates with others through language; it is a person as a member of society, compressed sociality, the result of formation, development and socialization as entering into society and into oneself.

What has been said does not at all mean that a person is a purely social being, completely devoid of biological characteristics. In the psychology of personality, biological and social exist not in a sequence, not in opposition or in addition, but in real unity. It is no accident that SL Rubinshtein said that the whole psychology of man is the psychology of the individual. At the same time, the concepts man and identity are not synonymous. The latter emphasizes the social orientation of a person who becomes a person if he develops in society (unlike, for example, from "wild children"), interacts and communicates with other people (in contrast, say, from deeply sick from birth). With this interpretation, every normal person projected on the social plane is also a person, and each person has several interrelated personal manifestations depending on which part of the society he is projecting: family, work, friends, enemies. At the same time, the personality as such is integral and unified, systemically and hierarchically organized.

There are other, more narrow interpretations of the concept of personality, when those or other qualities that are supposedly acting as its necessary attributes are singled out. So, the person is offered to consider only one who is independent, responsible, highly developed, etc. Such personality criteria are, as a rule, rather subjective, difficult to prove, and therefore do not stand up to scientific verification and criticism, although they always existed and probably will exist, especially in the structure of unduly ideological and politicized humanitarian constructions. The problem is objectively that a newborn baby can not be called not only a person, but also, strictly speaking, a person. He is most likely the applicant on the role of a reasonable man, since he has not yet a consciousness, a speech, or even a straight run. Although it is clear that for the parents and loved ones this child initially and convincingly exists both as a person and as an individual.

The individual is a category that indicates belonging to the human race. It emphasizes singularity (as opposed to a person) and indivisibility (as opposed to a person).

The individual accentuates in a biological person, but does not at all exclude the social components inherent in the human race. A person is born a concrete individual, but becoming a person does not cease to be an individual at the same time.

Individuality is a category that emphasizes the uniqueness and independence of each individual psyche (personality, individual, subject).

Each person is unique, and for psychology this is the same original given, as the very presence of the psyche. Another thing is that not always and not all studied psychic phenomena are considered at the level of their individuality, real uniqueness. Science is impossible without generalizations, without some sort of typification or systematization, whereas real psychological practice is more effective the more it is individualized.

The subject is an indication of the concrete, living, animate bearer of psychological phenomenology, activity and behavior.

The subject is traditionally opposed to the object, but in itself it is, of course, objective. The concept of the subject is one of the basic for philosophy, but recently it acquires some kind of updated, broad interpretation in United States psychology, where a special, subjective approach to the analysis of the human psyche and behavior is being developed (AV Brushlinsky). Thus, according to the terminology, the human psyche can be explored and described in different, but inevitably objectively intersecting aspects: personal, individual, individual, subject.

In modern psychology, not all of these approaches have been sufficiently developed and clearly used, especially at the level of practically oriented research. For example, in the educational and mass literature, the term "personality psychology" is used more often than others as a terminologically unifying, synthesizing one. Meanwhile, objective reality is much more complicated. All the psychological characteristics of a person are, of course, specific, but not all of them are personal in character. For the latter, it is necessary to have a specific social origin or special social projections of these psychological properties or qualities. Everything closes on the central methodological question of the correlation and interaction of the biological and social in the human psyche. Therefore, the problematic nature of the formulation of the criteria for human, personal, individual and individual gradations seems to be obvious.

Each person is multifaceted and integrated, ordinary and unique, one and disunited, changeable and stable. And all this coexists simultaneously: in a bodily, social, mental and spiritual organization. To describe a person, each science uses its own indicators: anthropometric, medical, economic, sociological. Psychology solves similar problems, for which it is necessary first of all to have an appropriate psychological scheme or model of similar parameters that distinguish one person from another.

The psychological structure of the personality (person, individual, subject) is a kind of integral system, a model of qualities and properties that quite fully characterizes the psychological characteristics of the person (person, individual, subject).

All mental processes are carried out in a particular person, but not all act as its distinctive properties. The latter include only some of the most significant, related to others, stable properties that have a specific projection on social interactions and human relationships with other people. The task of establishing such properties is complicated by the fact that in the human psyche it is hardly possible to mathematically rigorously identify the necessary and sufficient number of appropriate differentiating qualities. Each of us in something is similar to all people, in something only on some, in something on anybody it is not similar, including sometimes even on itself. This variation makes it difficult, in particular, to single out the notorious "most important" in a person who, of course, is grotesque, but not without a share of justice called sometimes "non-existent entity."

Different mental properties can be conventionally represented in the scope of at least four relatively independent dimensions .

First, it is the scale of temporal and quantitative variability - of the stability of the quality or personality of a person. Suppose a person's mood is more changeable than his character, and the direction of the person is more stable than the current worries and hobbies.

Secondly, scale of uniqueness-universality of the studied mental parameter , depending on its representation, statistical distribution in people. For example, everyone has a different property for empathy, but not all are sympathetic altruists or, on the contrary, convinced egoists and misanthropes.

Third, the measure of the participation of the processes of awareness and comprehension in the functioning of the psychic property. With this are connected such features as the level of subjective experience, the degree of controllability and the possibility of self-regulation of the psyche and behavior. For example, one person understands and accepts his involvement in the work performed, and the other does it unconsciously, formally and senselessly. Fourthly, the degree of external manifestation, behavioral output of a particular quality. This is a practical, strictly vital significance of the personality properties. For example, both parents equally genuinely love their child, but one manifests it in tenderness and hyperope, and the other in intentional rigor and increased exactingness.

To the above parameters of mental qualities can be added measures of their innate or acquired, anatomical-physiological norms or deviation, age or professional conditionality.

Thus, the mental space in which the psychic properties of the individual receive their representation and description is multidimensional, not completely ordered, and in this respect psychology has yet to do much for their scientific systematization. One of the bright domestic psychologists VD Nebylitsyn, in particular, believed that the main task of differential psychology is to understand what and why each person is different from the other.

In psychology, there are a large number of models of the psychological structure of the personality, which come from different concepts of the psyche and personality, various parameters and tasks of personal gradations. A number of monographic publications are devoted to an analytical review of such constructions. To solve the problems of our textbook, we use a model of the psychological structure of the personality, built on the basis of combining two well-known schemes of United States psychology, developed first by SL Rubinshtein, and then by KK Platonov (1904-1985).

The basic psychological personality model is based on the methodology of the personality-activity approach, is based on the acceptance of integrity and dynamic conjugation, the systemic structure of the personality and the psyche, on the assumption of objective measurability and the vital importance of the identified personality parameters. The research task is to understand what and why each person is different from the other in terms of psychology. This structure includes seven interconnected substructures, each of which - only accentuated the highlighted aspect, the conditional perspective of consideration of the many-sided human psyche. The personality is integral, but this does not mean its homogeneity. The allocated substructures exist in real unity, but not in identity and not in opposition. They are conditionally allocated only for obtaining some analytical scheme, a model of the psyche of a really whole person.

The personality is dynamic and at the same time self-resistant. It transforms the world, and at the same time it itself is transformed, i.e. self-changing or developing, realizing purposeful behavior and being itself in a social and objective environment. Personality and activity exist in unity, and this determines the basic direction of scientific and psychological study of the personality.

A. N. Leontiev formulated a detailed and promising methodological triad "activity - consciousness - personality", the specific psychological content of which is fully revealed in the subsequent chapters of the textbook.

So, in the psychology of personality, the following psychological components are singled out, or relatively "stand-alone" substructures:

• the direction of the personality (see Chapters 5, 7);

• Consciousness and self-awareness (see § 4.2, Chapter 6);

• abilities and inclinations (see Chapter 9);

• temperament (see Chapter 10);

• Character (see Chapter 11);

• features of mental processes and states (see Chapters 8, 12-18);

• The psychic experience of the individual (see Chapter 7).

These substructures can be decomposed into more detailed components: blocks, personal formations, separate processes, qualities and properties, described by different categories, concepts, terms. Essentially, the whole textbook is devoted to the description of the subject content of these components of the person's mental appearance.

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